As the World Cup rumbles to an end, pause a moment to salute Bosnia’s heroic though futile bid. There was something rather Irish about it all. Plucky small nation gets there and has a go. But what gave it special resonance was that Bosnia had emerged from recent terrible trauma, a horrifying war characterised by ethnic cleansing and murder of non-combatant civilians. The siege of Sarajevo which started in 1992 was the longest siege of a city in the history of modern warfare.

But then, this was a war of long memories. A series of empires had washed across the Balkans for over two millennia, starting with the Romans and ending with the Nazis. Along the way there was Byzantium, the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians. The Serbs have always been there or thereabouts – but the tidemarks of the different empires left behind the different ethnicities of the region and hence of Yugoslavia and the various pieces into which it fragmented.
The biggest was Serbia and its more extreme nationalist ideologues set about reconfiguring old Yugoslavia into a Greater Serbia, to restore the country and its people to what they saw as their rightful status. Their aggressive pursuit of this goal triggered a catastrophe for the region.
It has long been a hotbed. After all, in Sarajevo one hundred years ago another Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his pregnant wife. To some, Princip is a hero; to others a fanatic. Either way, his act prompted the empire to strike back against Serbia – and this, in turn, set World War I in motion.
It’s a region shaped, even defined, by war. That there is peace at present is a great achievement, but many people have pointed out that much remains unresolved. Like Northern Ireland, as the comings and goings of July remind us and where memories are at least as long as in the Balkans, trouble could be just below the surface. So, minnowing to the World Cup brings a little breeze to the oppression of a Balkan summer.
Of course, the impact of empire isn’t just about ethnic tidemarks. Often they have marked out territories without regard for reason or history. Many of the conflicts of Africa have their roots in stupid and misguided carve-ups made by mainly European bureaucrats drawing lines on maps.
The same is true in the Middle East. Iraq’s borders were largely set out by the League of Nations in 1920, when the Ottoman Empire was being dismantled under the Treaty of Sèvres. It could have been done in any of many other ways. In any event, thanks to war after war, it is now collapsing into three parts. Shades of Yugoslavia...
That this is happening as a result of an opportunist but lethally effective campaign by Islamic militants under the flag of Isis makes it all the more troubling. These people are, or rather have become, the enemy that the Bush and Blair partnership wrongly thought al Qaida represented. They’re absolutely fundamentalist, well-resourced and utterly ruthless.
They have built their fledgling state on that part of Iraq that is Sunni Muslim, leaving the Shias to the south and the Kurds to the northeast – so they will be hard to shift. Worse, they are attracting hordes of would-be martyrs and jihadists from around the world, many carrying western passports. If they are eventually suppressed, many of these will disperse around the world, battle-hardened and trained and ready to ply their terror on a global basis.
The leader of the new self-styled caliphate is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He has declared himself the leader of the State of Islam. Basically, he sees himself as the boss of bosses of Sunni Islam, right around the world. That’s four out of every five Muslims worldwide.
You can be pretty sure that his template is the rapid expansion of Islam under the Caliph Abu Bakr Saddiq and his successor Umar, between the years 632 and 634, when Arabia, Iraq and Syria were conquered with Palestine and, in due course, Egypt, the Persian empire, North Africa and Spain following by 720. In a recent surprise appearance to preach at a mosque in Mosul al-Baghdadi quoted from Abu Bakr Saddiq.
None of this is good news. And so we find new alliances sppringing up that would have been unthinkable months ago, with the US and Iran and Russia all cooperating to limit Isis’ expansion and intending, if possible, to crush it in due course. China, with its restive and largely Muslim Xinziang province in mind, will follow as will, with Pakistan in mind, India. Isis could be their worst nightmare come to pass.
One suspects that they are all thinking to themselves that, for all their faults, Saddam Hussein and the Assads kept this kind of thing under control. Those who celebrated the Arab Spring uprisings may now be thinking twice.
One way or the other we may fervently hope that the whole thing doesn’t accidentally degenerate into the mud, as happened in 1914. I have no problem with containing and crushing them so long as it doesn’t ignite the rest of the world.
But let’s return to Bosnia where Muslims are the largest religious group, with about 40% of the population, mostly Sunni. What do they think about it there?
Historically, they weren’t exactly fundamentalist, cheerfully swigging wine and brandy and being basically pretty Balkan in outlook. That, one suspects, is not what the reverend Abu Bakr has in mind. I recall that his counterparts in the Taliban banned music, so pleasures of the flesh will be eschewed.
Of course, he may not quite have the balls to ban frivolities like football. I mean, the Romans gave bread and circuses...
Hopefully his movement will run out of road before Bosnians, and the rest of the world, have to contemplate that particular hell...